Roger,
I am always stunned by your ability to mine the web for wonderful stuff. I happen to have the Peirce paper sitting on my table, so let me draw his argument out a bit further. Piece describes 4 ways of fixing belief . This one he calls authority. The two others he disapproves of are essentially stubbornness . pick something and run with it . and forming a school - getting together with a bunch of people and agreeing on something to run with. He thinks that all of these means have some benefits, but that the only beliefs that will endure are scientific beliefs, i.e., beliefs that are formed through organized scientific truth-seeking . experimentation, replication, theory, criticism, argument, instrument building, etc., etc. But even scientific beliefs are only fated to be true in the very long run, and nothing that we believe now can be counted on to be true. Also, truth is DEFINED in Perce to be just that which we are, in the very long fated to believe. So, instead of justifying the scientific method as that which takes us to the truth, he defines the truth as that which the scientific method [broadly understood] takes us to. It's a very strange philosophy, and it is classically pragmatic. Just as Holmes defined justice as what good judges do in the long run, Peirce defined truth as what good scientists produce, in the long run. In the short run, you're on you own. And bad scientists, just like other people, are prone to fixing belief on one of the other, less enduring, ways. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-b oun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 12:47 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: America and the Middle East: Murder in Libya | The Economist The Fixation of Belief, Charles S. Peirce, Popular Science Monthly, November 1877. http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html I was going to paraphrase another part of this, but looking at it again I realize my feeble bowdlerization wouldn't do it justice. [Emphasis added] Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young; having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated, or expressed. Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men's apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence. Let the people turn out and tar-and-feather such men, or let inquisitions be made into the manner of thinking of suspected persons, and when they are found guilty of forbidden beliefs, let them be subjected to some signal punishment. When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached, a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country. If the power to do this be wanting, let a list of opinions be drawn up, to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions, in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world. This isn't Peirce's solution to the question. And it doesn't really matter whether you let the religious fringe, the religious moderates, the rationalists, or the state enforce correct doctrines, the doctrines are never completely correct, and you always get unfortunate errors in the enforcement. -- rec --
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